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Dennis Dimick Oral History Interview, December 15, 2014 Title “Bridging the Gap Between Science and the Public” Date December 15, 2014 Location National Geographic Society Headquarters, Washington, D.C. Summary In the interview, Dimick discusses his family background and upbringing on a farm south of Portland, his involvement in agriculture as a boy, and his first experiences with photography. He then describes his enrollment at Oregon State University, the furthering of his passion for photography and photojournalism, influential contacts that he made with faculty and fellow students interested in journalism, and his activities as a staff member at the Daily Barometer newspaper and Beaver yearbook. As he continues his reflections on his years at OSU, Dimick shares his memories of campus life, his fraternity, and working during the summertime. He likewise notes the advancement of his journalistic skill set while an undergraduate, comments on his early engagement with environmental issues, and discusses his employment with the OSU Office of Agricultural Information. From there, Dimick recalls his graduate studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, his hosting of a radio program while there, and his broader impressions of life in the Midwest. Dimick then outlines his past work at a number of newspapers in Oregon, Washington and Kentucky, as well as influential people that he met during those years. The remainder of the session is devoted to Dimick's career at National Geographic. In this, Dimick recounts the means by which he came to be employed by the magazine, his initial duties at the publication, standout projects with which he was associated, and his increasing involvement in reporting on environmental issues. The interview concludes with words of advice for students of today. Interviewee Dennis Dimick Interviewer Janice Dilg Website http://scarc.library.oregonstate.edu/oh150/dimick/ PDF Created November 16, 2017 Dennis Dimick Oral History Interview, “Bridging the Gap Between Science and the Public”, December 15, 2014 Page 2 of 11 Transcript Janice Dilg: So today is December 15th, 2014 and I'm at the National Geographic Society's headquarters in Washington, D.C. And I'm here with Dennis Dimick, the executive editor for the environment for National Geographic magazine, and an alumni from OSU, class of 1973. My name is Janice Dilg, I'm the interviewer, and this interview is part of the OSU Sesquicentennial Oral History Project. Good afternoon, Dennis. Dennis Dimick: Hi, how are you Janice? JD: I'm great; happy to be in D.C. and happy to be here interviewing you. DD: Great, nice to be here. JD: So this is where you are now, but I'd like to start by taking us back a bit to where you started out in Oregon; a bit of your family history. DD: Sure. So I'm a fifth-generation Oregonian. My ancestors came to Oregon in the 1840s. Augustus Wright Dimick is buried in the cemetery near Hubbard. My dad grew up on what's now – it was a donation land claim, just east of Hubbard, near the Pudding River. So I have a long history in the state of Oregon. My dad graduated from Oregon State in 1939. His cousin, Rolland Eugene Dimick, started the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife at Oregon State. I've got an older brother, John, who graduated from OSU in 1969 or '70. JD: Expand a little on your family – where you lived, where you grew up, and some of your early influences. DD: Sure. We grew up on a small farm that, at the time, was about thirteen miles south of the city center of Portland. It was about three miles south of Lake Oswego. It has since been taken over by Interstate 205, for those who are familiar with the geography. But what it was, it was – my parents, my mother, Mary Elizabeth Fitzgibbon, her father, John Fitzgibbon, was on the faculty of the University of Oregon Medical School. And she went to the University of Michigan. She and my dad both worked at what was then the Oregon State Game Commission; they were both fisheries biologists. They married in '47 and they bought this small place south of Lake Oswego, and that's where we grew up. There were five of us kids, and it was a laboratory, really, for us; a place where we could roam freely. It's not something that seems to be common these days for kids. But it was great – we had woods, we had fields, we could get lost in the trees, and there was, believe it or not, lots of old growth Douglas Fir there, and cedar trees. So it was a great place. And we also raised livestock – we raised pure-bred Suffolk sheep, we had some cattle, we also had some pigs. Both my older brother John and I were in FFA, Future Farmers of America, the West Linn High School chapter. I was also in 4- H. Both of us exhibited livestock at the Clackamas County Fair in Canby and the Oregon State Fair in Salem, and when I was a freshman in high school I was the grand champion FFA exhibitor at the Pacific International Livestock Exposition, which at the time was held in north Portland. So we had a long connection to FFA. I then, after high school, went to Oregon State and started out majoring in Ag Ed. – Ag Education. I was learning to ostensibly be a high school vocational ag teacher. My older brother John went on and then taught for more than thirty years – at Phoenix High School for a few years and more than twenty-five years at Crater High School at the north end of the Rogue Valley near Medford – as a high school teacher. But when I finished my freshman year at Oregon State, I bought a camera, and that proved the change in my life's work. I shortly, after buying that camera – I was in the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity at Oregon State and my roommate the spring term of my freshman year was Kit Anderson; his full name is Nelson Christian Anderson III. He was the son of a county extension agent in Heppner. And he saw that I was interested in photography, but he was already a journalist. He was working at the Albany Democrat-Herald part-time. And he saw that I was quite interested in photography and he then introduced me, that next fall, to Quinton Smith, who was at that time the news editor at the Oregon State Daily Barometer, the school paper at Oregon State. [0:05:35] Special Collections & Archives Research Center, Oregon State University Libraries and Press PDF Created November 16, 2017 Dennis Dimick Oral History Interview, “Bridging the Gap Between Science and the Public”, December 15, 2014 Page 3 of 11 And then, a bit after that, I started taking pictures for The Barometer, for Quinton, and then enrolled in – I kind of did it backwards, I started working for the newspaper before I knew what I was doing. So I went over to the Journalism department and introduced myself to Fred Zwahlen, who was chairman of the department, and told him that I had taken this position shooting pictures for The Barometer and was there any chance I might learn about what I was doing by enrolling in his photojournalism class? And he said, "well, the class is usually oversubscribed, but in this case we'll make an exception." So I took the class and that was actually the beginning of a life-long friendship with Fred, or he was commonly known as Casper. And he was very informative and influential in my college days at Oregon State. JD: Chris Johns earlier mentioned the nickname of Casper, do you know what the origins of that are? DD: I do not know the origins of Casper. I do know that Fred and I and likely Chris, we all hit it off because we were all farm kids. And Fred grew up on a dairy farm in Beaverton, near what is now the site of Jesuit High School. JD: So you go off to OSU with desires to have a degree in agriculture and be a teacher, what inspired you to pick up a camera and what intrigued you about it? DD: Well, what inspired me to pick up the camera in the first place probably was because I had been exposed to photography quite a lot when I was very young. And my mother's father, John H. Fitzgibbon, was an avid photographer – he had a darkroom in his house in Milwaukie and whenever we were over there for family events and things, he was always snapping pictures of us with his Lycos, and we would see albums of his prints. So I was always intrigued by it, but never really had developed it. When I was maybe eleven or twelve, I actually had a brief experience – I had picked up some roll film cameras and was taking pictures with them. And, for example – I wish I knew where the negatives were today – there was, I think it was in 1962 on Columbus Day, there was a horrendous windstorm, the Columbus Day windstorm. It was very devastating to Oregon; lots of barns were knocked over. It was in the afternoon, milking time in the Tillamook Valley, and there were several barns in our neighborhood that were knocked over. We lost the roof of our barn. I spent the next week on top of the barn putting a new roof on. But what I did was I went around documenting all this damage, and I had taken pictures with this camera.

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